Quotes By Barbara Ehrenreich

America is addicted to wars of distraction.

We love television because television brings us a world in which television does not exist.

No matter that patriotism is too often the refuge of scoundrels. Dissent, rebellion, and all-around hell-raising remain the true duty of patriots.

So even though I consider myself a fairly upbeat person, energetic and things like that, I never do very well on happiness tests.

Well I do think there are people who are habitually negative and depressed and take the opposite approach because they imagine the worst, and their minds become dominated by that. They let their own emotions and expectations transform their perceptions of the world.

Personally, I can't see why it would be any less romantic to find a husband in a nice four-color catalogue than in the average downtown bar at happy hour.

Exercise is the yuppie version of bulimia.

Experimental science is fascinating, but I don't want to do it. I want other people to do it, and I'll read about it.

Employers have gone away from the idea that an employee is a long-term asset to the company, someone to be nurtured and developed, to a new notion that they are disposable.

Medical debts are the number-one cause of bankruptcy in America.

There's more pressure on women to be chirpy and perky.

I think it's tragic that we have this human capacity, which appears to be hardwired, or so the evolutionary biologists say, for collective joy. We have these techniques for generating it that go back thousands of years, and yet we tend not to use this.

We who officially value freedom of speech above life itself seem to have nothing to talk about but the weather.

Lenders, including major credit companies as well as payday lenders, have taken over the traditional role of the street-corner loan shark, charging the poor insanely high rates of interest.

People tend to judge presidents on how the economy performs, and yet we don't expect them to have the power to do much about it. Or we don't want them to exercise that power, if they were to have it.